


The Head and the Heart

by FreshBrains



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, F/F, Female Relationships, Girls Like Girls Ficathon, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Intimacy, Mutilation, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 17:59:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4489266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreshBrains/pseuds/FreshBrains
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Splendid’s good at waiting and thinking, but Capable can’t stand seeing people with such sadness in their hearts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Head and the Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evewithanapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/gifts).



> For the prompt at the LJ [Girls Like Girls Femslash Ficathon](http://inthewildwood.livejournal.com/40383.html) prompt: _Mad Max, Angharad/Capable, the head and the heart_.
> 
> Takes place before canon and ends sometime during the time Splendid and Furiosa are planning the escape.

Capable was always good at keeping her friends close and her enemies closer.

She was born there in the Citadel under Joe’s watchful eye, the only Wife who had a mother to love her and gift her with a beautiful smile. She also had two sisters, both older. The oldest, called Coast, had hair the color of fire, brighter even than Capable’s, and she jumped off the ledges of the Citadel after Joe came and took her away to make sons with.

(“We are not things,” Splendid tells them, foreign words that taste sweet, but Imperator Furiosa told her those words first, and Capable likes to think she also told Coast before she jumped into the hot wind to her death, the War Boys looking on. Coast was never a thing, but Coast was also buried in the Wastelands.)

The second sister, Pitty, was born with the shakes that made her fall to the ground in little earthquakes, but Joe still wanted her, even though she had a small-girl mind and didn’t know how to count or gather water or tell time of day. Before Joe could get to Pitty, Capable’s mother took out her eye and cut off a finger with a saw-toothed blade.

Mother said she’d do the same to Capable when Joe came sniffing, but Capable wouldn’t let her. She needed to be her sisters’ keeper and lie down on her belly for the wolf. She needed to do what her sisters would not— _could_ not. Or else they’d keep making her mother have more daughters and have her on the milk-machines until the day her body simply evaporated.

So Capable made new friends, slid the straps of her dress down her shoulder, crawled into the lion’s den. She never saw Pitty, never saw her mother unless she snuck off to see her in the Milking chambers. For a long time, she only had Splendid, who she never saw up close until they were suddenly Sisters.

Splendid was Joe’s first, his favorite, his special-wife. She was the most beautiful person Capable had ever seen—more beautiful than her mother, more beautiful than Coast. She towered over the War Boys with her long, skinny legs. She was like a colt, new and pretty but at the very bottom of the world’s food-chain. She’d given herself scars like Mother did to Pitty, only Joe still wanted Splendid for her lovely eyes and golden hair. The scars weren’t enough.

Capable adored Splendid from the very beginning in the way a new puppy-dog loves the beloved family’s mutt; she’s _there_ and she’s just like Capable. She knows exactly what happens when it’s Capable’s night in Joe’s bed.

 But Splendid kept no friends—not the wise Milking Mothers who Capable loved to visit when she could get away, not the little boys training for War who were always underfoot who called Capable ‘Cable’. Splendid stayed inside the locked chambers day and night, curled up on her bed with her tummy to the wall, staring at the stone. She only spoke to Miss Giddy and Capable, and only when they spoke first. Her shoulders moved furiously all the time in small, jerking movements, and Capable thought she was crying until she leaned over one day and saw that Splendid was writing letters onto pieces of yellow, lined paper.

“You can _read_ ,” she blurted out, startling Splendid enough for her stub of a pencil to draw a jagged mark across the paper. Capable backed up, guilty for snooping on the girl she wanted to call her sister.

But when Splendid rolled over to face Capable, she wasn’t cross. In fact, her eyes were brighter than Capable had ever seen, her lovely pink mouth turned into a secret smile. “I can read very well. Would you like me to teach you?”

Capable nodded, sitting down next to Splendid on her bed, and from then on, Splendid didn’t lie down and face the wall so much.

*

It was a bad day when Toast arrived, a bad, _bad_ day, and nobody could do a thing about it.

Toast was a city-girl like them. She grew up in the Bullet Farm, fingers used to hot metal and lungs used to thick smoke, her hair the color of midnight. But she was a fearsome thing. Rictus took her kicking and snarling to Joe in the night, Capable and Splendid trying desperately to pull her back into their chamber, but it only earned them black eyes and broken fingers. When she came back, she vomited into the Pot and collapsed into her bed, where she screamed and screamed into the mattress until her voice went hoarse with it.

The whole time, Capable lay wrapped in Splendid’s strong arms on her bed, eyes wide, wanting to go to Toast the Knowing and offer her comfort and strength, offer her the warmth of a woman’s arms.

But Splendid held her back. “Not yet,” she said, whispering into her hair, stroking her neck with shaking fingers. Splendid’s good at waiting and thinking, but Capable can’t stand seeing people with such sadness in their hearts.

*

Cheedo the Fragile and the Dag come together, hand-in-hand, bodies rail-thin and wasted from the sun, offering the only thing they had—their empty wombs waiting to be filled with Immortan Joe’s tar.

They are not sisters—they are something else, something that makes Capable’s tummy clench, something that reminds her of how she and Splendid look at each other when everyone else’s eyes are elsewhere. Dag is older than all of them but doesn’t look it, she’s so thin. Cheedo is only a child, and Splendid loves her so dearly right away, so fiercely that it makes her cry in Capable’s arms at night because she cannot save her.

“I write our names,” she whispers one night, chin tucked in the crook of Capable’s neck. They’re both sticky and warm from where they spent with one another hours before, using the clever presses and drum-rhythms of their fingers until they wriggled with the happiest feeling in the world. Capable can do it to herself, but it feels better with Splendid. “I write all of our names on my paper. The Splendid Angharad, Capable, Toast the Knowing, Cheedo the Fragile, the Dag. Over and over again.”

Capable breathes deeply, letting Splendid’s clean scent wash over her. The other girls sleep softly, their breathing-noises a soothing chorus in the dark room. Dag snores a bit. “Why?”

Splendid is quiet for a moment. “Because,” she starts, arms tightening around Capable, “because we deserve to have our names remembered.”

Capable doesn’t know why, but she likes the sound of that. She’d like to be remembered.


End file.
